12. Calix

Calix

When I left the house, Koa was laying on the floor on his stomach with his chin in his palms as he watched television. His legs were bent at the knees, his feet lazily moving apart and coming together again. He was laying on a messy pile of blankets and surrounded by stuffies. Javan was on the floor with him, though he was leaning against the couch.

I'd already said goodbye to both of them, but I couldn't help stopping in the door and just admiring them. Two of the four people I loved the very most in this entire world. Seeing them like this, with Javan reading a book, but glancing at Koa every few minutes, and Koa in little space as he watched cartoons… It made my chest feel full. Warm.

Koa was not happy I forced him to take time off work. But since he'd been in little space since the conversation, I knew how much he needed this break.

What I didn't tell him was this break was likely going to be much longer than he wanted. We'd been watching him self-destruct for far too long and I believed him when he told me he was okay. For months. Years. But I loved him far too much to let him lose control.

He did so once since we'd been together. He lost his ever-loving shit and ate several city blocks, leaving nothing but the metal structures in his wake. Everything was gone. There was chaos and confusion. The government officials were screaming about a terrorist attack.

Obviously, this was far before they'd known monsters were real. Not to downplay a terrorist attack, but a monster attack has topped that fear. Terrorists target certain groups of people and have a specific agenda behind them.

Monsters like Koa when he breaks down—their only goal is death. To sate their monstrous hunger. They're indiscriminate. Unstoppable.

He was wrecked for months after that. And those were people he didn't know. I wasn't sure I could pull him out of a downward spiral if he'd succeeded in eating this base two days ago. It was filled with people he cared about deeply.

His monster didn't have friends. But Koa? He'd be inconsolable.

Javan met my eyes and smirked at having caught me watching them. I puckered my lips toward him, kissing him through the air, and forced myself out the front door. Honestly, I could probably watch them all day. As I had yesterday.

But taking Koa out of work meant the rest of us needed to stay focused on our tasks as much as we could. It was all hands on deck as we attempted to follow several different avenues of thought in the fight against Silence.

I wasn't surprised Koa didn't come up with something from the tech we'd broken into. We hadn't thought about anything other than getting Ady back the first time. I would imagine Silence saw how easily we could get into their facility, and therefore buttoned up any holes. First would obviously have been technology.

Koa was used to being the best, though. He'd won more awards than fit on a wall for the advances he'd made and the success he'd accomplished over the years. There had never been something he couldn't do .

Coming up against a wall that led into an empty room was unacceptable to him. I thought we all knew he needed to take a break, but with the tiniest chance there was something hidden there, we all looked the other way as Koa continued to tear apart shreds that were too small to come apart any further.

I shouldn't have let him push so hard. This was my failure, too. One of the things that pushed us together quickly in our relationship was that Koa didn't have any self-regulation when it came to work. It was all or nothing. And Koa didn't do nothing.

We were all desperate for some magic fix, so we'd looked the other way and allowed Koa to push beyond what was healthy. There wasn't any secret reason. Everyone knew that Silence was huge. Massive. With generations of planning and advancements as they systematically reached their end goal. They'd already made so many strides, pushing so many races of monsters to extinction, while the rest of the supernatural world kept their heads down, hoping Silence wouldn't bother them.

By the time we decided to step up, we were already too late. This was a losing battle. We were greatly outnumbered. Severely unprepared. Already losing before we began to fight back.

So yes, we looked the other way when Koa started showing signs of breaking down because we so desperately needed some magic answer to give us an advantage— any advantage—against Silence. Everyone believed wholeheartedly that if one existed, it would be Koa who found it.

But there was nothing there for Koa to find. Literally, nothing at all. Not even their security systems were attached, so we didn't know for sure how many facilities they had. We had a best guess. We had an idea of what awaited us there. We knew that they were constantly coming up with new, awful weapons.

Weapons we couldn't even fathom. The kind that were race specific. Like those that had been designed to take out storms specifically without killing them.

Not for the first time, I wondered whether the right answer would be to attack one of their facilities. Then, instead of killing all their scientists—or whatever those fuckers were calling themselves who were breeding these new monsters—we took them, and for a little blip of time, looked the other way as they caught us up on the horrors they could produce for us.

Think what you want, but even human history was known for this shit. How many scientists were brought in from other countries to further another one with their brilliance? Not even peacefully. This was talking about after wars and shit.

Their drive was no longer to win a war, at that point. It was to see their project reach fruition. To put their scientific knowledge to work in advancing whatever area they were working on. It was a very obsessive drive.

I had no doubts that these crazy, sick assholes would work for us just as willingly and enthusiastically as they did for Silence.

Too bad we had morals and a conscience; it was very inconvenient at a time like this. But it was also what made us different from them. We obviously wanted to win this war, but we wanted to for the right reasons—no one should determine what races lived and which shouldn't exist. I used to think that's what was wrong with humanity. You had all these groups for whatever reason thinking people should think like them, should believe what they believed. And if not, then they shouldn't exist. They believed that there was only one way that was right.

Once, I'd thought that the drive to eliminate anything ‘other' was a human thing. It was a shortcoming specific to their species. Recently, I'd realized we were no different. This was exactly what Silence was doing.

The office was always busy now. I didn't work in the profession I had before we moved to the compound. Besides the basic functions of living—food, shops, etc.—the only real thing we worried about was fighting Silence. Winning an unwinnable war.

The beasts we saw? They were now a major complication. Rue had thought she'd created maybe 1,000 monsters in six years. Possibly a couple hundred more. But after the numbers were run, we had some definitive information—512 cities were hit. Each one with a population over 1 million.

That's huge to think about in itself. But what you didn't really realize was that 1 million residents was actually the smallest of those 512 supercities. There were thirty-one megacities with a population over 20 million each. EACH!!

This was why the death toll was over a billion humans. We weren't even looking at the census of monsters that dwelled in those cities.

Which brought us to the monsters. The smallest of the supercities had an estimated count of a dozen of these Silence created monsters. If we took that number alone—a dozen beasts per city—that leaves us with over 6,000 of them.

The question that begged an answer was, where the fuck were they now? And how could we take them out? I had no doubt that they were in the supernatural world. A world that had been partially abandoned because of Silence. But where? And how to remove them as an obstacle?

Then there were the other things we were always working on—knowing for certain how many Silence facilities there were. Where they were located. And how the fuck were we going to take them out?

Hypothetically, there were enough of us here to take all six (that we knew about) out simultaneously. We'd done so with far less than our numbers currently within the compound. Even taking out all the kids and a third of the population for whatever reason, that left us with over thirty thousand. We weren't breaking any records as far as a military force was concerned, but this wasn't a number to scoff at. Not when we were all deemed too dangerous to exist by Silence.

"Hey," Hadrian said as I dropped into the chair next to him. "How's Koa?"

Koa's meltdown was widely known. Not that we tried to hide it. Monsters were dangerous. Period. And he left a dead trail from his office to our front door .

"He's doing okay," I said. "Not happy that I'm making him stay home and unwind, but he hasn't left little space in over thirty-six hours. He knows he needs the break, even if he feels guilty taking it."

Hadrian shook his head. "He's not a one-man army."

"No. But he's never had to tell someone he doesn't have an answer that he's been asked to find. I could be very far off, but I don't think it sits well with him."

Hadrian laughed.

"What are we working on today?" I asked, pulling one of the laptops off the pile in front of me and opening it.

"Actually, we're scanning through all of Koa's notes."

"We're not going to tell him that," I said.

He smiled. "No. Saar had a thought the other day. He and Rue were walking around the compound, and they struck up a bargain that they're going to help keep each other accountable to stop carrying around guilt that they shouldn't be." He gave me a bemused look. "We know that Rue's father took her creations, and from what Rue's said to the group, nothing in her homelife ever made her suspicious. She grew up with very loving, attentive, and supportive parents. What if there's something tied into Rue within the data Koa's retrieved? It wouldn't have meant anything to Koa at the time, but now that we know about her homelife and we know that she was close with her father…"

"Maybe he's used her name as a keyword," I said.

Hadrian nodded.

"If that turns out to be the case, we're not telling her. I can only imagine how that would hit her." Having her name be the code to unleash a new plague on the world? Fuck, Rue would break.

I'd barely logged in when Oliver burst through the door. His eyes were wide as he looked around the room. I wasn't sure why, but chills broke out all over my body. A pit of dread formed in my stomach. My first thought was Koa. Had he lost his shit again? I should have stayed home .

But Oliver's eyes touched on me and didn't stay there. He walked into the room, ignoring everyone staring at him with concern and question, until he found the remote. A different kind of dread settled over me as he pointed it to the television and turned it on.

"Oh, no," someone said.

I wasn't sure what I was seeing at first. By all accounts, I thought I was looking at a movie or a documentary showing Vikings raiding coastal villages. But then I saw that these Vikings were actually hybrid shifters and with them were Rue's childhood creations.

The entire room watched in stunned silence as the camera panned to different angles as they set to work destroying everything and killing everyone. Everyone. I looked away when one of the hybrids stepped out of a house holding a small child, not kindly. My stomach churned.

Oliver lifted the remote and changed the channel. A different town—a different country if I had to take a guess based on aesthetics—but the same scene. Shifters and beasts, destroying and killing. Channel after channel. City after city.

I could do nothing but stare, unbelieving. This couldn't be real. This couldn't be what the world had come to.

"I don't get it," Jennings whispered from somewhere to my right. I couldn't bring myself to take my eyes off the TV, though I desperately wanted to look anywhere but there. "Their list of species too dangerous to exist includes humans?"

"No," Oliver said, quietly. "We're the opposite. Too weak to exist in the world they're creating."

"I hate to say this, but I think they have a point," Jennings said. "It's a massacre, and nothing they're doing is so much as slowing down the attack."

"That doesn't mean you should be murdered," Zen insisted. "Despite what those assholes think, they don't get to determine who has the right to exist."

"I don't think they agree. "

"I'm still really confused," Oliver said. "The original hypothesis was that a weaker species had risen up and in a kind of ‘fuck you' move, decided to declare war on all the more dangerous species, just to prove they weren't as weak as they'd always been treated. Now we know that to be false because, my understanding is that shades are considered a dangerous species, one that is on the hit list, right?"

"Correct," someone answered.

"We can presume that shades aren't the only apex species running Silence. There are likely several more like them. Then why are they trying to kill everyone off? Their own species. Humans, who very clearly pose zero threat to them. What do they hope to gain?"

"I think we've been overthinking this," Hadrian said. "We're trying to apply logic so we can understand their motives. The problem is, we know we don't think like them. I think this is far simpler than we've been making it out to be. They're killing everyone who poses a threat to their vision of the world they want to create. A threat to their vision in one of two ways—one, they can fight back, hence why they've exterminated as many apex species as they could. And two, a threat because they simply don't meet their standards—humans. Many older generations of supernaturals believe humans are inferior species. Vermin who have taken over far too much of the world."

"That's…" Oliver trailed off. "Sick."